Rethinking School-Family Communication after Pandemic : New Protocols, Competences, and Alliances?

School-family communication is an extremely delicate issue, especially in times like the one we are currently experiencing due to the pandemic, which is strongly marked by the need to necessarily rely on technology to allow teachers and parents to exchange information or simply to communicate. Although in Italian schools there are formal communication protocols that provide for the use of official digital channels, there is an 'underground' of communication situations that rely on unofficial channels and involve both parents and teachers. In many cases, school regulations do not norm the above-mentioned cases and this causes some parents and teachers to be very wary of forms of communication that use unofficial channels. It is therefore more necessary than ever to reflect on this phenomenon, which is difficult to investigate precisely because it takes place in borderline areas that often escape regulations and scientific debate. The research hereby presented, which has been in development for 18 months in a school institute in the metropolitan city of Bologna, aims to investigate how teachers consider the issue of school-family communication, trying to answer the following questions: Are teachers' digital competences enough to guarantee a good level of technology-mediated school-family communication? What is the teachers' perception, in terms of usefulness, of ICTs as a tool for communication between school and family and between colleagues? Are the communication protocols used by the schools effective? How can school-family communication processes be improved?